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Radical Brewing: Recipes, Tales and World-Altering Meditations in a Glass
Tons of great history on beer/brewing. Crazy ingredient ideas & great discussion/explanations on how they affect your brews. I keep re-reading sections all the time. I like how Mosher gives a recipe, but doesn't lecture you on nailing a certain stlye and gives suggestions how to tweak it to your own desires. Screw styles, brew what tastes good to you. This book helps you do that.This book saved me a lot of time and money by not brewing several batches I probably would not have liked by telling me what ingredients impart to beer. A must read for intermediate homebrewers.
Radical Brewing: Recipes, Tales and World-Altering Meditations in a Glass
Randy has certainly done a great job of pulling together info and techniques for a wide variety of brewing ingredients. If find myself looking through this book quite often when looking for a certain flavor or wanting to experiment with a different ingredient in my next brew. I wish there was more info on sources for some of the stuff (I'm about out of a few things I got from Randy couple years ago!)but most stuff is readily available.
Radical Brewing: Recipes, Tales and World-Altering Meditations in a Glass
The strange title fits. It is written with wit, humor, passion and loads of knowledge. I've got a couple dozen brewing books, but I keep coming back to this one.Like others, it covers the basics of techniques. Each chapter examines a different genera of beer, origins of similar beers, how they were brewed, how they evolved, how to brew similar beers (both all-grain and extract) and how you might personalize them. While Ray Daniels does a great job of nailing a style, Randy Mosher pushes well beyond the boundaries of defined styles and inspires you to be creative.Do you want to know how to use an unusual adjunct? How about the qualities of various spices? Fruits? Stranger ingredients? Randy provides example of historical brews using stuff I never would have dreamed of putting into my beer, and leaves you eager to try something new.
Radical Brewing: Recipes, Tales and World-Altering Meditations in a Glass
This book is awesome. If you are like me, and you don't listen to what the other brewing authors say about perfecting a few beers that you like, read this one. I hardly ever brew the same beer twice, and I like experimentation. This book will pave way for many new ideas and tasty new brews. There are a few inaccuracies and typos in the book. For example, altitude does change the boiling point of water. However, the few mistakes are far shadowed by the excellent writing and research that went into this book. If you brew with a lot of odd ingredients like I do, you will have to pick this one up.
Radical Brewing: Recipes, Tales and World-Altering Meditations in a Glass
I've been rebuilding my brewing library on my Kindle since the fall. I find it convenient on brew days to have what amounts to a reference library in my pocket.Unfortunately, Radical Brewing for Kindle is a complete disappointment: it is both poorly edited and poorly formatted. Spelling mistakes abound. Some of the lambic section is entirely, if humorously, unreadable, "entire rather than using a bf Immediately 20 percent of the mash years ago." Location 7085. Other formatting problems can only be fixed by setting my Kindle to the smallest font.To add insult to injury, the index, an essential part of any reference book, does not include links or even location numbers. It is, simply, a list of words.Do not buy the Kindle version. It's a shame since the dead tree version has become a staple of many brewers' shelves.Edit: the Kindle version was taken down several weeks ago pending revision.
Radical Brewing: Recipes, Tales and World-Altering Meditations in a Glass
This is a great book, and I agree with the majority of other reviewers in that Papazian or Palmer are the books to learn from. However, I would like to point out that there are many numerical inaccuracies - for example, pg 105 in the recipe for Polka Dot Pilsener: "1.25 quarts of water per pound or .53 liters per kilogram". This gives a mash ratio of 2.08:1 in US measurements but 0.53:1 in metric. People reading this book are most likely experienced enough to recognise the problem, but it's frustrating nonetheless and would seriously mess with a beginner.